Hey everyone! My name is Jordan Arel. I have always hoped for a romantic relationship with a woman who shares, or at least supports me in, my impact goals.

It is also very important that we are mutually attracted to each other, share values and goals, and have a happy relationship.

Here is a Fermi estimate for myself (maybe it will also help others) of the likelihood of finding such a woman and what it might take to do so.

From past experience I estimate that, in terms of personality, I am extremely attracted (marriage-level attraction) to about 1/300 women I meet.

Of the few such women I have met, only about 1/2 have been attracted to me a mild to moderate amount in return. I suspect if I had met 10 times as many such women, perhaps 1 would have liked me enough to consider me marriage-material; so I estimate ~1/20 women I am highly attracted to will be mutually attracted to me.

1/300 * 1/20 gives an estimate that I will share mutual attraction with 1/6,000 women I meet.

Now from this it is important to exclude women who are not a values or lifestyle match. I have found compatible values and lifestyle actually have a quite-high correlation with compatible personality; however, I suspect something like only 1/3 of those with mutual attraction will share or at least appreciate my extreme obsession with impact, allowing me to feel supported by mission kinship/empathy (In my last long-term relationship I was told it’s not going to work because “I’m too obsessed with saving the world.” Which was accurate.)

There are other lifestyle factors of which I am somewhat uncertain, so I will give another 1/2 penalty that, for some reason or another, it won’t work out despite everything else.

1/6,000 * 1/3 * 1/2 brings the estimate down to 1/36,000 women being an ideal match. This means that if I chose women at random I would have to date one woman every day for ~100 years to find a woman that is a good match. My timelines aren't that long, so seems like I need a better selection process.

There are several selection criteria which I have noticed occur in unusually high proportions in women I am most attracted to, for example, (including approximate rareness of characteristic):

• High intelligence .1 (120 IQ or higher) 
• Altruistically Motivated .01 (top 1 percentile) 
• Overachiever/highly ambitious .05 (top 5th percentile) 
• Unusually Playful .05 (top 5th percentile) 
• Red hair ~.04 (in the United States) 
• High sex drive .15 (top 15th percentile) 
• “Spiritual” .15 (percent of people who meditate) 
• Musicality .1 (moderately to highly skilled) 
• Caring .15 (top 15th percentile) 
• Theatrical .15 (guess)

If I simply required all of these characteristics, naively assuming there is no correlation/anti-correlation between characteristics, this would mean I would have to go through more than 10^11th women to find one match

Non-coincidentally, none of the women I have liked have actually had 100% of these characteristics.

While the full combinatorial math is too hard or at least annoying for me, if I hypothetically took the top five most important characteristics and said she has to be in the top 10th percentile in at least three of those characteristics, if GPT-4 did the math right (I double-checked and pretty sure it is correct), this would select only .856% of women.

This is good enough for a Fermi estimate. I can narrow the pool of women down significantly based on such characteristics; I just have to find a way to screen for those characteristics and perhaps iteratively seek even better screening criteria, algorithms, and screening methods.

To finish up on the math aspect of this, while this screening process would leave me with only ~1% of women, I suspect it would initially have something like a 90% false positive rate;

So instead of reducing the search from 36,000 to 360 women, I expect it would really only get me down to needing to search through 3,600 women. I could get through them all if I dated five women per day, for one hour each, over two years, this wouldn’t be completely impossible, but I suspect that through other screening processes like screening at various levels of depth, utilizing machine learning, hired help, and a lot of iteration, I could probably eventually get this number down a lot further and find more efficient processes that give less false positives and false negatives. The rest of this post will speculate on a few such techniques.

A few possible techniques: 

• Using bots to search through and screen dating profiles
• Using machine learning, especially on hard to quantify qualities, trained on data from interactions with women and profiles I like
• Maybe hiring some data scientists to help me do this better
• Rapid iteration to improve this process
• Maybe signal-boosting to quickly reach a large number of women by becoming more famous in my field of altruistic interest, dropping a few $1000 on a rapidly tested and iterated dating profile, or other ways of reaching a large number of potential women faster

Another thought, maybe I just need to find the right spaces, for example highly involved & high performing EAs or Social Entrepreneurs, hanging out at Irish music festivals may be wise (the top two women I have liked had red hair which is a 1/625 probability by pure chance (and both were also talented musicians)), hang out at the Mega Society, etc.

Something I have been thinking about a lot lately is being the type of person who would attract the type of woman I would want to date, which would mean myself being in the top 10% or so of certain characteristics I hope she will share, plus other generally attractive characteristics.

I hope this was helpful or entertaining, would love to hear feedback and ideas. If you are interested, here’s my dating doc I just created.